Oculus Go Beats Out Nintendo Switch & More as Amazon Top Seller – Road to VR

12/03/2019Comments Off on Oculus Go Beats Out Nintendo Switch & More as Amazon Top Seller – Road to VR

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Apparently Black Friday and Cyber Monday have been good to Facebook this year, as Oculus Go has jumped far up the video games best sellers list on Amazon, beating out notable entries such as Nintendo Switch, Oculus Rift S, and Oculus Quest.

Undoubtedly the consumer friendly pricing has attracted plenty of Amazon users for this year’s biggest sale in preparation for the holiday season, as the 32GB version is currently just $150, and the 64GB version at $200. You can find the 32GB version here on Amazon, and the 64GB version here.

At the time of this writing, Oculus Go is sitting at third place, which is just above Nintendo Switch with Gray Joycons; at 33rd place is Oculus Rift S, and at 43rd place is Oculus Quest. Sitting at first and second are vouchers for PlayStation Store credit and PS Plus, which ought to make for easy stocking stuffers.

First introduced in May 2018, Oculus Go brought to the table an experience very similar to Samsung Gear VR, albeit without the need of smartphone to drive its graphics.

As an ‘all-in-one’ VR headset with headset tracking only (unlike Oculus Quests’ room-scale tracking) Facebook mostly couches it as a media consumption device with the added ability to play a library of games designed specifically for the single controller and its modest mobile chipset, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821.

Although you can’t play more graphically intensive games, or games that require room-scale tracking and two controllers like Beat Saber (2018) or Job Simulator (2016), the ability to watch streaming services in your own private movie theater such as Netflix, YouTube, Plex, Hulu, and Showtime, has been a pretty substantial draw.

Development for Go has admittedly slowed down somewhat since the hypetrain left the station for the $400 Oculus Quest, but it should have casual users looking for a cheap and portable VR solution consuming media, playing light games, and even popping into social VR spaces for some time yet to come.